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He hustled up Avenue A with winter leaking into his cuffs and down the collar of his too-thin jacket, hunched his shoulders in against the stiff wind that blew desiccated leaves and paper garbage up the sidewalk past his feet.
Finally, he saw the sign for his destination up ahead: Ian’s Pub, an Alphabet City dive like so many others. He didn’t even have to go inside to know what he would see when he arrived. An old railroad flat, concrete floors, a bar running along one side, high tops or tattered couches up the other. Some buff, tattooed, and bearded guy slinging the drinks. Maybe a pool table toward the back.
He ducked inside and was surprised that it was much nicer than he expected with black-and-white tile floors, leather banquettes edging one side, a polished wood bar lining the other. There was a gleaming jukebox, Frank Sinatra crooning through Bluetooth speakers mounted in the corners of the ceiling. Fly me to the moon.
It was only three in the afternoon and the bar was empty except for the woman sitting all the way in the back, alone.
The warmth of the indoor air was a relief, but Henry was still shivering. It wasn’t the first such meeting he’d had. He had sworn to himself that if it was as soul crushing as the other two, it would be his last. Some people, he had determined, were just destined to be alone in this world. And it was very possible that he was one of them.
“Cat?” he said, approaching the table.
“Henry?” Her smile. Her eyes. There was a zap of electricity, familiarity. He knew her—his cells knew her.
She slipped out of the booth quickly and before he could stop her or move away, she tackled him with a big hug and held on tight. He was stunned for a second, as he had been when Gemma had done almost the exact same thing, then he closed his arms around her stiffly, enduring her embrace just to be kind.Alice never liked affection either, Gemma had told him gently.She bristled when other people touched her.
The only touch in his life that hadn’t made him uncomfortable was Piper’s. He craved her touch. His whole body ached with missing her. She wouldn’t even talk to him right now. Text only.
When Cat pulled away she took off her thick-rimmed black glasses and wiped at her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said with an embarrassed laugh. “You must think I’m a freak.”
“No,” he said. “No. It’s—all of this. It’s strange, emotional.”
“Yeah.”
She put her glasses back on, then slipped into her seat and he slid in across from her. The bartender came over and Henry ordered a hot tea with a side of bourbon—to warm him up and calm his jangled nerves.
There was a stuffed canvas sack beside her, filled with notebooks and folders. This was common to people like them. Seekers. People wanting to find lost pieces of themselves, their pasts. Gemma called them Soul Miners, people hunting for what makes them who they are.
Sometimes I think none of it matters, his aunt had tiredly admitted to him recently when they were knee-deep in the story of a great-uncle on her father’s side, reading a letter she’d found in the attic of a cousin. It was a stilted love poem to a woman named Sylvia, not his wife.Sometimes I think we’re all just like cut flowers in a vase. That what came before or what will come after doesn’t mean anything at all. We have our time here and that’s it.
But that didn’t seem right to Henry, there were all these stories—people living, loving, dreaming, working, hoping, falling in love, making babies, dying—and all those stories linked through time to other stories. His story was just a chapter in a book that would be written forever. It didn’t make any sense unless you read the chapters that came before, did it?
“So how many meetings like this have you had?” asked Cat. He tried not to stare at the shiny black locks of her hair, at the narrowness of her face, the shine to her eyes, lighter than his. Henry’s eyes were so brown they looked black, but there was something about the shape of Cat’s that reminded him of what he saw in the mirror.
He knew that she was five years younger than he was, that she was some kind of wunderkind programmer, with advanced computer engineering degrees from Harvard, that she lived in the Village. They determined that they’d probably been at a few of the same conferences over the years.
“A couple,” he said, answering her question.
“Who?”
She reached over and took out a folder, on top was a printout of the report he knew you received from Origins, listing percentages of ethnic heritage. Just a glance across the table revealed what he already knew.
When Henry’s results had arrived, he and Gemma had printed it out and pored over it. As they suspected, 47 percent of Henry’s heritage came from Great Britain, which included Scotland, and Ireland. Gemma was almost 100 percent from that region, with some “lower confidence” results tracing to Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Italy, and Greece. The rest of Henry’s results had been from the Iberian Peninsula which consisted primarily of Spain and Portugal, and Caucasus, the region that contained parts of Southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, among other countries. As they poured over his results, he found himself gazing at his reflection in the china cabinet across from Gemma’s dining room table. The room was rarely used for dining, unless it was takeout they shared late at night when they’d “gone down the rabbit hole” as Gemma called it. The room instead was dominated by books, boxes, a second computer—all overflow from her office upstairs.
His dark skin, his thick black hair. The shape of his eyes; it made sense. Actual genetic sense. He told Gemma as much.
“That’s cool, isn’t it?” she said. “To know. To understand.”
There in the results that listed relatives was Gemma, and a smattering of other people they had in common who had opted to be contacted by newly discovered relatives. But there was also a long list of other people with no connection to Gemma.
“Oh my goodness,” said Gemma, scrolling through.
“What?”
“These people—a couple of them. They’re a twenty-five percent match.”
“What does that mean?”
